Past tense verb-form errors made by Primary Six Students at S.K. (A) Datuk Haji Abdul Kadir Hassan, Petra Jaya, Kuching, Sarawak / Roslan Sebi

This analysis reflects the students' weaknesses in using past tense verb-forms for writing English sentences. This is the major problem that they face and suggestions need to be impiemented immediately by the school administrators and teachers. The students' weakness highlighted in this analysis is the inability to distinguish and differentiate the past tense verb-forms correctly. This problem can be seen in both task 1 (questionnaire) and task 2 (narrative essay). The majority of them still cannot discriminate between the present and past events and they tend to be confused and make errors in using past tense verbs in writing English sentences. As a result, the students are still weak in using past tense verb-forms. They have to be well prepared and exposed to lots of practices before they are able to write essay questions in Section C (Question 22), in the final examination (UPSR). From this analysis, the best way to assess the students' errors is to follow Dulay and Burt's Scheme (1982). This scheme provides the most appropriate method to check and collect the students' past tense verb-form errors in writing English sentences. Here, students' errors are categorized into four areas: omission, addition, misformation and ordering.